Лучшая история времени (Геше Майкл Роуч), занятие 2

[Speaker 2]
This is where my thing was, but now it's gone.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, I'd like to thank Lauren Anatole one more time. Thank you. Okay, before we continue disproving modern science, I thought it would be nice to show you what's going on in other cities.

I had a long meeting today with the Three Jewels board, and it was awesome, and then somewhere during the meeting it dawned on me that they didn't know what was going on in other cities, or other countries completely, so I thought it would be nice if, especially if the Three Jewels staff and volunteers, if you knew where you fit into the larger picture of people around the world who are affected by the Three Jewels, and by the people who are trained at the Three Jewels.

So, it's partly showing off so you can enjoy, and in Buddhism we say that your own karmas will increase or flower or open faster if you enjoy other people's good deeds, and then secondly I just thought it would be nice if you saw where you stand in the global picture of things. So, I wanted to show you some of our projects, the progress going on in the projects around the world. And then, my final motivation for doing that is that we always need fresh warm bodies for all of these projects, they're all really virtuous, they're all really kind to people and they're doing good things around the world.

So, if you see something that attracts you, or something that looks interesting or fun, then you're welcome to get involved, okay? They're just totally fun things to do, they're all beautiful things, and personally they have made my life happy. If you do things, mostly as volunteers, beyond just your own needs and your own activities, if you reach out to help other people in the world, then your own life is much happier, okay?

So, I'm kind of—my job is partly to help you make your life happier, so here are things that you can get involved with if you like. Then during the break, I'll point out some people that you can talk to if any of these things look interesting to you, okay? So, we just did this presentation like 45 minutes ago at a coffee shop, there's no particular order to it, but here we go, okay.

So, the one great news is that we received a grant to be used as an urban college in Sedona, Arizona. I live about 20 minutes from there, on a mountain, on a mesa, empty, and in front of me the view, and I was really happy that we were able to fundraise, it was about, I think, $800,000, and we were able to fundraise the money, and we bought a nice building for an urban college. Here are some of the things we'd like to do there.

That's the view, my house is in the middle towards the back, really. That's some of the views, and that's the building that we purchased, that's the front of the building. And that's crepes and waffles, so DCI has a contract with a large company in Columbia, South America, and they have 70, they have a chain of 70 crepes and waffles, they're called crepes and waffles.

They're very famous because all the workers are abused women, all the owners are abused women who start, they got their own, what do you call that? Their own franchise, yeah, each woman is running her own franchise in a different city in Columbia and in nine other countries. So, we're working with them to design a coffee shop for the front of the college.

Next. This is the interior design style that we want to have, it's a Japanese style, that we are stealing from a very beautiful place in Shanghai, where we gave a talk to the MBA students of Hong Kong University, Hong Kong University, what's it called? HKUST, Science and something.

HKUST. And we just really like the interior of their building, so we're going to renovate the building in Sedona, and we got a grant of, how much? 700,000? 600,000 to renovate the building in this style.

So, the inside of the college will be in this kind of Japanese style, and John Brady and Connie O'Brien are doing, they're heading up the renovation with an Italian architect. Say again? Guang Dong Wang?

Chinese would say it's Chinese style, yes. No, Japanese style does come from ancient times from China, but it goes back and forth, and it's a beautiful style. I don't know whose it is exactly.

This is another part of the place in Shanghai. We're going to have downstairs a full video studio. We were in the Ukraine, we did some radio shows and TV shows there.

There's a new movement in the Ukraine of young people who just buy television equipment and, you know, the latest computers, and they move into a basement and they start a TV station. So, given modern technology, about $100,000, you can start and run a professional TV station anywhere in the world. So, we were very inspired, we gave a talk, we gave a TV interview in the Ukraine, and the driver couldn't find the place, and he took us to the address and we walked around the building like three times and we couldn't find the TV station.

And then we realized it was a single room in the basement, and it looks very professional, it's a very professional TV station. So, we got inspired, we talked to them. Three guys were running the TV station from laptops, and between news items they were playing a video game.

And we were so impressed. So, we're putting in facilities for MOOCs, Massive Online Something Courses, for teaching people by Skype or doing other video projects. So, almost the whole floor of the building will be devoted to video equipment.

I forget why that's up there. Oh, yeah, so, why is that up there? This is what we're doing worldwide.

This is a talk in Guadalajara, 1,000 people came to that one. This is Singapore, we had about 800 people there. This is Malaysia, 1,800 people came there.

And we had the three-year retreatants. Five minutes before the talk, I asked Ben and Kendra if they wanted to perform a song, and they did. And people went wild.

The song was called, What I'm Gonna Do When I Get Out. And it was like a country song, and it was really beautiful. And I think that's the largest audience we ever had, and they just wowed them, and it was very beautiful.

This is another group at a retreat in Malaysia. This is in Kiev, we have a very strong growing group in Kiev and Moscow. So, it's very beautiful to see the Russians and the Ukrainians working together through the Diamond Cutter Institute.

So, the Russians will come to the programs in Kiev, the Ukrainians go to the programs in Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Krasnodar, and other cities, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk. And so, it's beautiful to see the two countries working together on the level of people to people. This is Shanghai, we had the largest retreat ever, it was 250 people this last year in Shanghai.

We're leaving again for Shanghai in December. This is Diamond Cutter Institute, this is a program where people who have been trained in ACI, such as, I think the best programs in ACI in the world are at the Three Jewels in New York. There are two concomitant, like six year programs going on here.

And then we take those teachers and we train them in giving presentations to the general public outside of a Buddhist context. So, we make it secular, but we present the same ideas of karma, and basically that you can achieve your own goals and you can be successful in your own life if you understand the rules of karma and how to serve other people, how to make other people happy, how to give other people the things that you would like. And that concept is kind of growing like wildfire around the world.

We are booked for years, and we need more people. So, those of you who have had training and things like that, we desperately need more help. We have many invitations, probably to 50, 60 countries, and we need help.

So, if you're being trained at the Three Jewels, if you're studying the ACI courses, we would love to take you. The new people get to go to Novosibirsk in the winter, or Bishkek. If you know where Bishkek is, you cannot go.

This is Zhengzhou. Guangzhou is the largest city in the world. It's about 35 million people, and we have a very, very great group there.

They're doing a lot of work in prisons, hospitals. They've got the ACI courses going. They're just outside of Hong Kong.

Half the stuff in the world is produced by this city. Probably all the clothes you're wearing, the computer you're using, and the seats you're sitting on. Okay?

Seriously. Okay. This is Shenzhen, which is a sister city to Guangzhou.

We have a great group in Hamburg. They've done now, I think, six years of DCI courses. We test new courses out in Hamburg, and they are part of a group that we call Greater Germany.

Greater Germany means Austria, Germany, and the German parts of Switzerland. Zurich, and places like that. So, this is a very large group going in Munich, Vienna, Krems, and Zurich.

An awesome group of people, and they are spreading throughout the German-speaking areas. This is a Russian group. Very strong in Moscow, and spreading both ways.

This year we'll be doing more programs in St. Petersburg. We just finished a program teaching 36,000 employees of Earl's Sib, which is one of the largest oil and banking companies in Russia. Each employee is studying the diamond cutter.

36,000 people. Okay? This is a new idea we have.

We launched it in Singapore this year, and it's DCI programs, how to apply the principles of karma to addiction, problems like addiction. We are helping with hospice programs in Indonesia for children with HIV, and we're also helping with the teaching in hospitals in China and in Singapore, and we're applying these principles to helping both patients and staff, medical staff who are stressed out. So, that's a whole separate division, and part of that involves prison work in the United States, which I'll talk about later.

Okay. This is a question we have. Why doesn't DCI exist in New York?

And I put it up there just because it would take about five very determined people to pull off a DCI event in New York City, to start DCI. So, you're like five years behind the rest of the world, okay? It's kind of strange that the place where this all started, and you know, the leading city in the United States doesn't have DCI programs going on.

But that's your problem, okay? If five people are very interested. These are kind of secular programs presentations of karma.

We teach a lot of business people, we teach medical, professional medical people, other professional people, and just how to be more successful by serving other people, okay? But the presentation is in a very, what do you call, business-like way. I always wear a suit, and I would get arrested in some countries for wearing these robes.

And then, we really just try to reach the general public. I think when two thousand people come in Malaysia, many of them are Muslim, many of them are Buddhist, Chinese Buddhist, and we just try to find a common language that will help them in their real life, okay? So, if you'd like to get involved with something like that, talk to, can Scott or Reid stand up?

Talk to them during the break, okay? These are two of the vice presidents of DCI. They travel all over the world.

They were doing the programs in Russia for the companies there. Next. The Diamond Cutter has been spreading to many countries.

I think it's in 35 languages now. This year it was finished in Serbian, and Greek, and Romanian, and we just got the rights to, contracts were signed for Argentina, and it's spread to about 35 countries. So, normally before we go to a country, they finish publishing some of the books, and this year was a really good year for that.

I think books were published in maybe 10 or 15 new countries, okay? So, you can see that's, what is that, Swedish? That was finished this last year.

Next. Oh, I don't know, they stuck that in there. We do interfaith programs.

This is me with a Jewish rabbi and the representative from the local Catholic Church in Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, Argentina has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel except for New York City, and we gave a talk with a representative from the Catholic Church, and it was really wonderful. So, we do that in a lot of countries.

We give side talks with the local religious leaders. We're doing a book with a very influential Muslim leader in Central Asia, the Russian parts of Central Asia, named Norbjakov. So, there's a publishing company in Moscow that's heading up that, and we're working on a book with him.

And then another book is coming out with a Chinese, I think he's in the Communist Party, I'm not sure, but we're trying to reach out and do collaborations with people in other countries that might help the world. Okay, next. Okay, why is she here?

Do you guys know Peter Mertl? Okay, anyway, where is he from? Austria, but living in Sweden.

He runs a lot of the programs in Germany and Kiev. He'll be coming to Beijing, China, in a week or two weeks, and he's been teaching for DCI all over the world. He teaches a lot in Eastern Europe.

And one day he said, Geshe-la, I would like to apply this in my own life. And I said, well, what do you need in your life? And he said, I need a girlfriend.

So, I told him how to do it, you know, how to plant the seeds, and this is his girlfriend. And she's a Russian novel model, and she's very, very intelligent, and she's a very good, she's finished the Beijing and Shanghai next week, two weeks from now. So, that's the kind of cool stuff that can happen if you learn this stuff.

That was Scott's idea, okay. Next. This is a new book we worked on last year.

It's called The Karma of Love. It's a...three years ago we were in Guangzhou, China, teaching a big group of business people, and one lady raised her hand and said, I'm not interested in business success, I already rich, you know. And then I said, well, why did you come here?

And she said, can you use the principles of karma to fix your husband? And I said, what's broken with your husband? And she said, we've lived together for 30 years and he's never washed the dishes once.

Like, is there somewhere to compel him, through karmic means, to wash the dishes? And then, it triggered this whole multinational thing about giving relationship talks, and it's still going strong, and we did a book about it. The book came out in China last year.

That's the Russian version just came out. Okay, next. These are, we do a lot of TV shows.

I think we did TV shows that covered most of the population of Ukraine and Bulgaria and Moscow. And we did a lot of radio. And it's, the press overseas has been much different.

They are very interested in a new model of business that might help their country, like the Mexican press is very interested in new ideas that might help the economy of their country, or might help their listeners to develop themselves spiritually, and also economically. So they're very focused on that, and it's a pleasure to work with all of those countries, with the press. It's been really nice.

We just did an interview, I think a week ago, with the largest Russian newspaper. And even in places like Peru, they did a full page description of the ideas that might be useful for their country. And that's how the press works in some countries.

Okay. If you don't have time, we'd like to invite you to Guadalajara, Mexico. We do four free retreats a year.

In those retreats, we don't do general business talks or relationship talks. We go deep into the ancient scriptures. And we're in the middle of a 12-year teaching called Lamrim, based on a very profound Tibetan text.

And I think we're, how many years? Four or five years into it. And we have three of them in Arizona every year, and one in Mexico, because a lot of the foreign participants cannot get into the United States.

So this is about, I don't think it's an hour and a half flight from where I live, two hours. The place is a Catholic monastery and retreat center, and it's just stunning. It's in the town of Tequila.

And they claim to have started it, I don't know. There's an argument about it in Mexico. We learned flamenco.

We're taking them to Beijing in April, okay. We learned how to do flamenco. Next.

This is twice a year now, we're going to have the Lamrim retreat at Diamond Mountain in southern Arizona. Next. That's the retreat valley.

We chose—can you go back? We chose—back. Back, yeah.

We chose one of the most isolated areas we could find in the United States. At the time, there was no cell phone service. It's sneaking in slowly.

But you can see a little tiny building on the saddle of that mountain. That's my retreat cabin. And there are 30 cabins there that have been built by the three-year retreatants and donated to Diamond Mountain.

So if you have time, you can come in March, I think. That's the last one. Wait, go back.

You're going too fast for me. This is a typical cabin. They're very beautiful, they're very quiet, and they're just perfect.

The nearest—in Buddhism, a great monastery is defined as a monastery which is the longest distance from a grocery store. So I think we have it. It's probably an hour from the nearest serious grocery store, right?

More? Something like that. Depends how you go.

But they're just exquisite cabins, and you're welcome to come. That was the dates of the last one. I think the next one's in March.

And you're welcome to come. The teachings are free. You have to pay something for food and lodging, but the teachings are for free.

So that's four ten-day retreats a year. And that will go on for another, I think, six or seven years? Something like that.

Eight years. You can jump in at any point. It's very deep.

We have a lot of fun, we meditate a lot, and you learn deep spiritual practice. The Chinese loved it. The Chinese who came last October freaked out because they saw—it's one of the best places in America to see stars.

It's high, high desert, and it's very, very beautiful at night. Next. This was the last retreat there.

I like this photo because I took it. But that's the road that leads up to the mountains of Diamond Mountain. So, Diamond Mountain is about fifteen minutes down that road, in those mountains.

And it's just a really stunning place to do a retreat. That's a typical bedroom. That's the teaching hall.

Okay. This is a project we're doing. Maybe you'd like to get involved with it.

We have done it for 27 years. We locate ancient—when Tibet was lost, most of the libraries of Tibet were burned. Five thousand libraries were burned, and the books were burned.

So, we've spent 27 years finding ancient books, recovering them. Like, we spent 14 years in St. Petersburg at the Bibliotheca Vostokovodenia, which is the manuscript collection of the Tsar. And we identified 141,000 scriptures there, and we are typing them.

It'll take 150 more years. But we finished about half a million pages and preserved them online. They're free online, and we pay refugees, we train them, and we teach them how to do it.

But we need a lot of help in the United States also. So, if you're like totally bored and don't have anything to do in New York, you can help us from wherever you live. It doesn't matter.

Okay. We need more warm bodies. There's a lot of work to do.

We're also starting a project. We have recovered and input every Buddhist text from ancient India. We finished about two years ago.

That took 25 years, and those are finished. That's 3,600 texts. Those are all input and saved.

And now we're looking for the Sanskrit. We're trying to preserve the Sanskrit versions. Okay.

So, if you can help, you're welcome to help. Talk to the same two dudes, and they can refer you to the right people. These are special search programs that are made by Ted Lemon, who just showed up tonight from Honolulu, I think.

And I'd like to... Can you stand up? He and his wife, they don't live in Honolulu, they live in Vermont, which is much colder.

But, I think it's been over 10 years he's been developing the search tools to search the scriptures. So, you can search, like the ideas we're going to start out with tonight, they come directly from those half a million pages. And I can, with his search tools that he's developed, I can search a half a million pages in about two seconds, and come up with the ideas that I needed for the talk tonight.

So, it's amazing. The project is extraordinary. And I think it's the largest source of income for Tibetan refugees for the last 25 years.

So, if you'd like to be involved with that, you're welcome to talk to these guys. Then we have YouTube videos. We got a grant from somebody in...

Can I say? I don't know. Same two people, Ted and his wife Andrea.

They are funding 200 YouTube videos on how to use the scriptures, how to search them in the database. And so, those are on YouTube, they're free. They have major numbers of views, 192 now.

I think mostly it's people who got there by accident. But, if you would ever like to be able to, in a few seconds, look up like, you know, how to... the karma that you would need to get your husband to wash the dishes for the rest of your life, for example, you can learn it on those YouTube videos, okay?

Okay, next. And I think we finished about 20 now. We got 180 to go.

That's one of the videos. Next. This is something that started many years ago.

Some of you were here in New York in the early 2000s, and we taught, I think, about a hundred classes on how to study the classics of yoga. So, people who are involved in yoga, or who are learning yoga, if you would like to know the deeper meaning of yoga, or the philosophy of yoga, we taught many years of classes here in New York, and several hundred yoga teachers came and learned how to pronounce ahimsa correctly, for example, stuff like that. We taught them the deeper meaning of yoga.

And nowadays, YSI is giving weekend courses, mostly for yoga teacher trainings. So, we have 48 courses, weekend courses. They are based on four great classics of yoga, the Yoga Sutra, the Hatha Yoga Padipika, the Bhagavad Gita, and Master Shantideva.

And then, you can have someone come in for one day, or two days, or three days, for a few hours, and teach you or your group, you know, how to use the Yoga Sutra to help stop your addictions. We just finished last weekend a section in Los Angeles on how to, what was it, procrastination, how to get over your procrastination from the Yoga Sutra, using the Yoga Sutra and ancient texts by Master Shantideva. So, that's what Yoga Studies Institute does, and if you're interested in that, you can talk to them and they'll turn you over to the right people.

I think it's also online for free, right? Oh, we're debating about that. Okay, anyway, eventually.

Next. We have a special center that we purposely plopped down in the roughest Mexican-American neighborhood in Phoenix called Glendale, which is not far from where I grew up. It's called Casa Jardin, which means House of the Garden.

It's been going, I think, three or four years now. We've been trying to help the Mexican-American community, both in the United States and in Mexico. So, we have a sister Casa Jardin in Guadalajara.

There are 50,000 Mexican-American children, actually, mostly from Guatemala, were pushed over the border this year, alone, without their parents. Their parents got them to the border and pushed them across the border, and then the United States is trying to take care of 50,000 children. And so, we designed an institution called Casa Jardin.

There's a branch in the US, a branch in Mexico, and the idea is to help illegal aliens get their paperwork straight, help them to be in touch with their families, and how to become legal, and then how to learn a skill. So, we're teaching them mainly solar installation and the, what do you call it, making solar cells from parts of solar cells, making solar panels from parts of solar cells, from our groups in Taiwan and China. And we're trying to get an industry going in that area of the world, which is the Sonoran Desert, which Diamond Mountain is part of that desert.

So, that desert doesn't recognize the border. It stretches from northern Mexico into southern Arizona. It will probably be the greatest, it is the greatest source of sunlight in the world for solar cells.

So, we want to teach the Mexican-Americans to compose these solar cells, and then we'd like to teach them to set up companies to do that. And so, we've been working on that, and we're still fundraising for that project. That's a million dollar project, and it's going well.

We have a very good team in Guadalajara, and a team in the United States. The team in Guadalajara also helps indigenous Mexican people who have cancer. They have a clinic there, a live-in clinic, so you can move in with your family while you're getting treatment.

And that's been very successful. That's been going on for some years now. So, if you're interested, these are people trying to get in the United States.

They jump on a train. There are two routes to the United States, eastern route, western route. The western route goes through Guadalajara.

Last year, 11,000 people stopped in Guadalajara and decided not to try to get into the United States. So, now there's a refugee problem in Guadalajara, so we're working with those people. But we need more funding.

We have a very successful prison project. You can see Jeff Eddy, who's here. Where are you?

Can you stand up? I'd like to recognize him. And Anatole Muin, where are you?

Yeah, right. So, along with Nick Lasha and Christine Walsh in Phoenix, they've been in several state and federal prisons. The federal prison work is all women prisoners.

It's a high, what do you call it? Blue collar, they call it club fed. White collar crime ladies who are very good students of meditation and yoga.

And we train prisoners. There are many gangs. They're mainly concentrated into Cambodian gangs and Mexican gangs.

And we work with them in the prisons in Arizona. And they're doing very, very well. And they're going to the courses.

They have lots of time to meditate. Their meditation is better than yours, I would dare say. They're extremely good now.

And their yoga is getting very good. And their study is getting very good. So, if you're interested in that, anyone can go.

I go. You just have to have a clean police record. You have to go through a short training.

They are very beautiful guys, very well mannered and women. And a lot of our Arizona people are visiting the prisons like once a week or once every two weeks. And they're very grateful for it.

Next. In front of the, in Diamond Mountain for philosophical discussions, we have a classical Tibetan debate ground. And a lot of people honed their skills there.

But at the Sedona College, we decided to have a coffee shop. And we got a grant. We applied for a grant.

We got a $350,000 grant to open a coffee shop. And that will be right in front of the college. And that will be done, Cat Airhorn is working on that project.

She's building it out. The building will take $1.1 million. And we're going to do Moroccan style.

Riyadh. Which is an open courtyard in the middle and coffee shop all around. And the purpose of that place is that students from the college will sit down in the coffee shop and argue about ideas like we're going to do today.

And we just decided and the sponsor agreed that American people do better discussing things over coffee. Seriously. A lot of great ideas happening in coffee shops right now.

Especially in New York. I've been to some, I was at Kopi Kopi today. It was awesome.

Then these are some plans for the design of the coffee house. If you're interested in helping, come to Sedona. Sedona is actually quite civilized, not like Bowie.

Okay, next. This is our project at Sarah May Monastery. This is a re-founded Tibetan monastery.

The whole Sarah Monastery has 3,000 monks now. We've been supporting that monastery for 36 years. And now there are up to 3,000 monks.

They started with 100 refugee monks. And we have a program where we send students over to study at the monastery. So this Sunday, can words stand up?

Where are you? I'd like to give him a hand. He's a Tibetan scholar.

He works at the college on the textual research. And he and a group of other people are leaving for Sarah on Sunday. And I'm happy to say that my teacher, Khen Rinpoche Losantarchin, who loaded me with everything for 25 years and passed away in 2004, so he's been reborn and was recognized by the Dalai Lama, and that's him.

Except he smiles too much. But this is a typical student group from the United States who went to study at Sarah. They stay for a month and they learn Tibetan philosophy and Tibetan language, and they do really well.

That program's been going on for I think six or seven years now. And then they come back and they work very hard. They come back and work on the textual research work, the database.

So, we need about another five generations and we'll be done. Okay, next. That's it.

Anyway, those are the projects we're doing. If you're interested in any of them, talk to these guys and they can head you to the right people. Okay?

So let's go on with our refutation of Stephen Hawking. We didn't quite finish last night. We talked, we started out talking about different models of where the world came from, what's our place in space, is the earth the center of the universe or even the solar system?

And we went from the 300 B.C. up to 1974, and we discussed how the model or the ideas of where we came from and where we live have changed through the history of science. And the reason we talked about that was science still has some very, very, very serious paradoxes and contradictions that they have to deal with, and we're going to be talking about those tonight. Okay?

And then, of course, Sunday we will resolve them all for the scientists. And we'll get deeper into the problems tonight, but basically science has some macro problems and micro problems. There are problems with the general theory of relativity, which explains large movements of planetary bodies, stars, galaxies, universes.

And then there are problems with quantum mechanics, which explains how atomic particles and subatomic particles operate. And there are contradictions in both theories. There's also a problem that the theory, the general theory of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics don't agree within themselves.

So the principles that have been worked out for the movement of planetary bodies, stars, are contradictory to the theories that have been worked out for the movement of atomic particles and subatomic particles. So we'll be talking more about that tonight. Why do we need to talk about that?

We said, we resolved last night that we wouldn't be giving some theoretical presentation that has no relevance to your life. We said between quantum mechanics, which deals with subatomic particles down to quarks, and the general theory of relativity, which deals with things as large as the local 100 billion light years that we're in, between those two is your partner, okay? The person you live with, or, you know, trying to live with.

And in theory, okay, get this, try to grasp this, try to put your mind around it. Whatever truths we come up with for the movement of physical matter from quarks up to universes should apply to how your partner acts at home, okay? Whatever ideas we come up with for how things happen, and how things make other things happen, those ideas, those resolutions that we come up with of problems, should apply to problems between you and your partner, okay?

Why? You're made of the same stuff, okay? Like, whatever the universe is made of, and whatever atomic particles are made of, you're made of that also.

And the interaction between the two of you, on an emotional level and on a physical level, it should be explicable by a correct theory of science. So right now, science has concentrated on the physical sciences, meaning, how does physical matter work? And then there's some exploration into psychological processes and things like that, and there are some attempts to make it material, that, you know, psychological problems that people have are related to imbalances of hormones, or synapses that didn't fire at the right time, or things like that.

So, if we're going to come to a unified theory, unified means, can we unify how small bodies act, and galactic bodies act, then it should cover your partner, your relationship to your partner. We took an example last night, do you remember what it was? I knew for New Yorkers like 24 hours is a long time, but...

Well, what relationship thing were we talking about last night? Yeah, your partner criticized you, okay? You come home, you're tired, you're exhausted from your work at the museum or whatever, and you walk into the kitchen, and suddenly, quote, for no reason at all, your partner criticizes you for something.

And you're especially sensitive because you're totally exhausted from having worked all day. You were looking forward to open arms and a big hug when you got home, and instead your partner asked you why you didn't arrange for dinner, or something like that, okay? So, what causes an electron to spin in a certain shell around a helium atom, right?

Which is only one shell. And what causes the universe perhaps to ascend, pop out of a black hole at the beginning of time, right? Measurable time, 13.8 billion years ago. The causes which cause those two things should also apply to why your partner criticized you tonight, okay? Can we go there? Is that okay with you?

Okay, if we find the truth of how universes were born from a single point of matter at the beginning of time as we know it, and if we find the truth of how electrons spin around a neutron, specific neutrons in certain shells, then we should find the secret of why your husband criticized you when you came home from work today, and what? How to stop them, okay? Like how to straighten them out, permanently, okay?

Without shooting them, okay? So, what I propose tonight and tomorrow is that by studying the deeper causes of things, by coming to a unified theory of science, we should also solve our interpersonal problems, and our international problems, okay? Things like that, got it?

So, we were halfway through, what? The six kinds of causes presented in the Abhidharma, because we finished the four causes as presented by Aristotle, okay? That's where we are, and we're going to go back to that.

Let me see here. I think we got through number four of the six causes from the Abhidharma, so I think we're on page number nine, if I'm not mistaken, okay? Of last night's reading.

If you don't have last night's reading, don't stress about it, because I'm just going to spend ten minutes on it and go to tonight's reading, okay? So, don't stress about it. If you want a copy of last night's reading, you can pick one up, am I correct?

Yeah, somewhere in the back, okay? But I wouldn't suggest handing them all out, okay? The fifth kind of cause, why are we talking about causes again?

We want to know why your husband or your partner criticized you when you got home from work. What was the cause? We're exploring the cause, okay?

I'm not just talking about meaningless stuff, okay? If you could find the cause for why your husband criticized you at work, when you got home from work last evening, perhaps the rest of your life could be totally happy and blissful, okay? Like, that's what we're talking about, okay?

We're not talking about why did this atom split into quarks, okay? Charm, beauty, etc. Truth, that's another story, okay.

So, the fifth kind of cause presented in 17 centuries ago in Buddhism is called ubiquitous cause, meaning every state of mind includes five states of mind. Any person who is alive and conscious has five different functions going on in their mind at the same time, okay? First one is called sarva or vedana in Sanskrit.

Do you know what it means? Feeling, okay? Like, all conscious beings from ants up to, you know, Einstein, they all have feeling going on all the time, okay?

There are three classical forms of feeling, what? I feel good, I feel bad, I feel in between, okay? You could divide them into five.

Physically I feel pain, mentally I feel, emotionally I feel pain, I feel neutral, emotionally I feel happy, physically I feel bliss. These are the five, but every human mind has them all the time. You always are feeling something, even if it's neutral.

The capacity to feel never stops in a human being, from the moment you're born until the moment you die, you never stop feeling, okay? So, we should understand what causes it, okay? And how can we affect it, okay?

Secondly, we call it dūṣe. Any dūṣes out there? Not douches, okay?

Dūṣe means the capacity to distinguish between things. This person is tall, this person is short, I like this person, I don't like this person. Those two mental functions in Buddhism are considered the root of all suffering, okay?

This makes me feel good, I want more. This makes me feel bad, I hate it. I hate you, I love her, okay?

These are called the roots of samsara, okay? These two. But every human mind, and in fact every animal mind, all the time is distinguishing between this and that, okay?

Third, capacity to think, okay? Some kind of thoughts going on in your mind, cetana. What does that mean in...what's another word for that in Sanskrit? lele jīte nāsakīr dēni saṃbhādaṇḍecay. Karma, okay? The movement of the mind, anytime the mind moves, and you think of something new, this is karma, okay?

Another name for it is karma, okay? So, fourth one, it's called rekpa, which means the contact between your mind and the outside world, and then the ability to focus the mind on an object. Every human mind, every mind in the universe has the capacity to focus on something, even if it's only in New York City for a few seconds.

And, what do you call it? ADD, okay? Even people with ADD, they focus on something for a few seconds and then they switch to something else.

All sentient creatures have the capacity to focus on something, okay? Why are we talking about that? These five mental functions, which are shared by all people at all times, in the mind, are said to support each other.

They hold each other up, like, they say like sticks in a tripod, okay? So, your capacity to feel supports your capacity to discriminate between things, you see? So, in a way these are causes, these are one more kind of cause.

If we're looking for the reason why your partner criticized you this evening, we have to explore all possibilities, okay? And this is one more place to look, okay? The mind is interacting with the mind, something's going on, okay?

The fact that my husband can focus upon anything at all and feel negatively about it, allows him to have critical thoughts. If your husband were incapable of thinking, he couldn't think bad, okay? So, his capacity to think is a contributing factor for his criticism of you, but is it the real cause, okay?

We are looking for real causes, we are struggling through the four causes of Aristotle, the six causes in the Abhidharma, then we're going to go to the four causes of Dharmakirti, then we're going to finally go to the single cause of the mind only school, and we're going to see if we can find out why is your husband doing that, okay? How does one thing cause another thing? So, I'm giving you a lot of information, but don't get hung up on it, okay?

We're looking for why does one thing make another thing happen. If you can figure that out, you could be happy forever, and you could do weird stuff like, my teacher challenged me to make a million dollars using these ideas, and I made 250 million dollar company, annual sales, okay? Just for fun, just as an experiment, it was bought by Warren Buffet in 2009, okay?

If you understand how things really work, if you understand what causes, what things cause other things, could you make weird things happen? Could you make somebody give you a couple million dollars for some stupid college to teach how to do weird things, okay? Like, is there a way that you could change your life?

Is there a way that you could use these ideas? If you understood how one thing makes another thing happen, could you perfect your relationship with your partner, for example, okay? That's what we're doing tonight.

Last cause of the Abhidharma, I think it might be on page 10 for you, is the karmic cause, and this is the last kind of cause given in the Abhidharma, 17 centuries ago. This means that perhaps the reason your husband is criticizing you is because you, there's a picture there, there's a photo. What?

Where is it? There you go. You told your kid who wouldn't put his shoes on when it was time to go to school, that he was the stupidest kid in New York, okay?

When did that happen? Three weeks ago. You planted a karmic seed, and now when you come home, for a quote, what?

No reason at all, your husband, you know, rags on you, okay? So, we say there's no such thing as no reason at all. Is there a karmic cause behind things, okay?

We're not going to go much into that, it's just the sixth choice in the Abhidharma. We'll talk about it later. We'll get to that tomorrow.

Alright, we have to go faster Geshe Michael, I know. Okay, four causes of master dharmakirti. Only 13 centuries ago, so he adds four more that you should know about.

Number one, one is called the immediate cause, like fire for smoke, okay, is an immediate cause. There's no intermediate thing going on, okay? The example in real life would be my comment about the garbage after dinner, which precipitated my husband's attack on me.

So, I hassled my husband about the garbage, and then suddenly, ten minutes later, he's criticizing me, okay? So, there was a direct, immediate cause. I did something, and then my husband did something, okay?

Got it? Do you agree to such a cause? I complained about, I asked him to take out the garbage, and then he got upset, and then he attacked me about something else.

Is there such a cause? Is there such a cause and effect relationship? Do you believe in it?

Do you believe that something that, like, you know, you ask somebody something, and then a minute later they got angry at you. Is that why they got angry at you? You believe that?

Most people believe that. Then people say, why did your son get mad at you? And you say, well, all I did was ask him to take out the garbage, you know, okay?

That's a very common belief that you have, okay? Is it unreasonable? If you hadn't asked him to take out the garbage, would he have gotten angry?

Okay. Indirect cause is the second cause of... By the way, we're gonna resolve all this.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm giving you, what's 4 plus 6 is 10? 14. I'm giving you 15 different choices on why, what caused your partner to be critical of you.

I'm giving you 15 different choices, okay? They're all wrong, okay? According to what I'm gonna teach you by tomorrow, I hope, every single one of these is wrong, okay?

Your husband didn't criticize you because you asked him to take out the garbage. He didn't criticize you because he didn't get enough sleep last night. He didn't criticize you because he's having a lot of pressure at work.

He didn't criticize you because he's a male. He didn't criticize you because... We gave you a lot of choices yesterday, right?

They're all wrong, okay? Then why do you give us 15 wrong causes, and then hold back the last one, until the last day, so that you will come to all the talks? Now, I'll tell you why, okay?

And we're gonna talk about it tonight. When I was in religion class at Princeton University, the thing I... One of the only things I remember is called visceral presuppositions, okay?

Then I asked the teacher, I don't understand what visceral means here. He said, from your guts. In your guts, you have a feeling about things, okay?

One of the biggest visceral presuppositions is about atoms, you know? If I say, what's making the chair hold you up? Why don't you fall on your bottom on the floor?

What is it in the chair that's making the chair hold you up? Then automatically, every single person in this room, they think, there's something hard in the chair. There's something in the chair that makes it hard, okay?

And we're gonna explore that idea. If the chair is hard, then the left side and the right side of the chair must be hard. If the left side of the chair is hard, the left side and the left side and the right side and the left side must also be hard, okay?

That applies down to the atoms in the chair. There must be something about the atoms in the chair that make it harder than your butt, and that's why it keeps you up, right? And deep down inside, you believe it, okay?

Deep down inside, every person in this room believes there is something in the chair that makes it hard, and keeps you up from falling on the floor. You believe that, deep, deep, deep down in your heart, you believe it. Even before you went to sixth grade and they taught you science, okay?

You believed it before that. You thought that was true, okay? It's wrong, okay?

All science believes it's true. Science is struggling to find something in the chair that makes up atoms, that makes those atoms different from butt atoms, and keeps the butt off the floor, okay? And no, struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle.

And then they come to huge paradoxes that make it apparent that they're mistaken completely, but they're so, they're so, how do you say, attach the idea of something in the chair, they can't let it go, okay? We're going to talk about it. They can't let it go.

They struggle to find, is light a wave or a particle? What's the answer? It's neither, and it's both, okay?

We have to get there. We'll get there, okay? I'm not being cute or zenny, okay?

I'm telling the truth, and if you understand it, you can what? Make your husband wash the dishes for the rest of his life, and it's worth it to hear this stuff. There's something you can do with it, okay?

I'm not kidding, okay? I'm talking about a perfect relationship or something like that, for the rest of your life, okay? Like, wonderful happy days every single day, okay?

Stuff like that, important stuff, alright? Alright, indirect cause. I thought about the garbage this morning and how messy it looked, and that caused my husband to criticize me this evening.

Possible? Is that a cause? Normally, I mean in normal thinking.

Could it have led to my husband criticizing me tonight, that I thought about how bad the garbage looked in the morning, after he had already gone to work? Could it have been an indirect cause of his comments to me? Yes or no?

Of course! I thought the garbage looked bad. It was stinky.

I asked him to take it out whenever it got stinky. He left for work already. The garbage is stinky.

I think the garbage feels stinky to me, okay? Then, by the evening, through a series of other thoughts, that becomes what? A comment to him about why didn't he take out the garbage.

That triggers what? You guys are like British, you're just like British, I gave this talk at British Airways, they're all like, I thought about how bad the garbage looked and smelled in the morning, then what did that trigger in the evening? I made a comment, and that was the direct cause of him getting critical of me, okay?

What was the indirect cause of him getting critical of me? I had the thought in the morning that the garbage was stinky, okay? That's called an indirect cause, according to Dharmakirti, okay?

Is it correct? We say no. Why are we talking about it?

I'm trying to cover every possibility, then at the end you have to give up, okay? You have to give up, and you can't. You can't.

You'll walk out of here on Sunday, and you'll have problems. By Monday, with somebody, okay? These are deeply held wrong ideas, okay?

But at least we cracked it, okay? At least you heard about it. Okay, next one.

Dharmakirti says you can do it a different way, and one is called a substantial cause. It's similar to Aristotle's material cause. Give me any example.

It could be metal or wood, an acorn splitting open and creating a tree, or an ingot of gold being fashioned into a statue of Tsongkhapa or something like that, okay? These are material causes, okay? So, he calls it Nyerlengi-gyu.

Those of you who are studying Tibetan, this is where Nyerlengi-gyu comes from, Dharmakirti, Master Dharmakirti. So, the stuff that the statue turns into, is it a cause for the statue or not? Of course it is.

Try to make a statue without an ingot of brass, a brass statue, okay? Is it a cause? Is the acorn a cause for the tree?

Of course it is, okay? It's the stuff that turns into the tree, okay? Got it?

That's called Nyerlengi-gyu. The brother of that, the sister of that is called Tlenchik Chekhyen. Say, Tlenchik?

Chekhyen. I'll give you a break, okay? 15 minutes, I promise you a break, okay?

You have to work a little bit, okay? If you're going to get some understanding that changes the rest of your life, it's probably something you haven't thought about yet, okay? Which implies you have to work a little hard in this class, okay?

Don't just get sleepy and space out, okay? You paid a lot of money, no you didn't. Anyway, say, Tlenchik Chekhyen.

Yeah, Tlenchik Chekhyen means contributing cause. In the case of the acorn, it's the water, sun, warmth, soil, fertilizer, okay? These are contributing causes.

So, the main cause of my husband, the thing that happened the moment before he criticized me, that flowed into that criticism was his frustration, okay? So, the frustration was building up in him. Why?

Because I hassled him about the garbage. Then his frustration is building up in him, and then finally, the frustration flops over into criticism. That's called material cause.

Frustration...I'm getting frustrated, you too. The stuff of his criticism was the frustration of the moment before, okay? It took a new form.

The ingot turned into a statue of Tsongkhapa, got it? Okay? The material stuff that turned into his criticism of me was his frustration, okay?

What contributed? We give the example here, it's in a photo, what's happening? He's stressed out at work, okay?

You don't know what went on in your husband's office today. You come home, he looks frustrated, you know, he complains to you, he criticizes you, but what you fail to think about is perhaps he had a really rough day. Perhaps like ten things happened at work, ten disasters happened at work that you don't even know about, okay?

And then you feel like he's criticizing you for no reason at all, okay? But he had major disasters at work, you know, he got threatened by his boss three times, his own workers were stupid three times, he had to threaten them. You know, stuff happened at work, okay?

Those are called indirect causes, okay? Contributing causes, contributing factors, okay? There could be both going on.

Do those really contribute to your husband getting critical of you? I'll tell you why not. You can be aware of them and still have a lousy relationship, okay?

It doesn't create a perfect relationship to know that your husband had some bad time at work today and got angry, okay? It doesn't fix it, okay? It doesn't fix it.

You can become more sensitive to the fact that your husband had a bad day at work today, but it won't stop him from being critical, got it? Understanding those factors doesn't get you what you want. So, it means you didn't understand the real causes of him criticizing you, okay?

Try to grasp that, you know? I'm trying to teach you the secret to the universe, really, seriously, okay? If you understand it, you can have a perfect life, financially, health-wise, emotionally, partner-ally, you can have a perfect life.

The causes that we've covered so far, which are only all the causes known to East and West, don't work. They don't help, okay? Got it?

Let's go deeper. Okay, I have a thing in China, I say, it's a joke, like in Beijing or Shanghai, I say, do you want to go deeper? And they all go, show the Mexicans.

Do you have it? No, it was there. Try to find it, tell me when you find it, okay?

They get, like, they're not like you guys, they get excited, okay? Anyway, I say, do you want to go deeper? Okay, good, that's better.

And then I'll let you have a break, okay? Follow me for one more cause, and we're done with last night's class, okay? And they're threatening me I've got to stop on time today.

We'll just slow down time, okay? No problem. I call the next one the V cause, it's very sophisticated, okay?

It's a sophisticated cause. This is something proposed by the Mind Only School, this is a very high school of Buddhism. Is it the highest school?

No. Is it completely correct? We would say no.

Is it useful? Is it higher than anything you thought of before? Yes, okay?

It's higher than any reason you ever thought of for your partner criticizing you, okay? So, it's going to help you deal with your partner. Is it the final answer?

No. Then why should I learn it? If you, in the Tibetan system, the Buddhist system of teaching is to teach you what's wrong first, and show you why it's wrong, so you don't slide down there later, after I'm gone back to Rimrock, Arizona, okay?

Like, if I teach you all the wrong ideas, and explain to you why they're wrong, then after I teach you the correct one, you're supposed to not slide back to the old way of thinking, okay? Is your husband critical of you because he had a bad day at work? No.

Is he critical of you because he's tired? No. Is he critical of you because blah blah blah?

The answer is no no no no no, okay? Here's a more subtle one. Here's a more subtle one.

You ready? This is Mind Only School. Did you find that thing?

No. He found it? What was the car?

Anyway. Okay, the Mind Only School is very cool, alright? They say that the reason your partner criticized you is partly what the lower school, Abhidharma school said about karma.

What was the cause of your husband criticizing you in our example of the sixth cause of Abhidharma? You criticized your child when he or she wouldn't get ready for work, sorry, for school, and he wouldn't put his shoes on, he was running around the house and giggling and jumping on the bed, and you said, you're like the stupidest kid in Manhattan, okay? And then, when you say that, you create a karmic seed.

We'll talk more about that, okay? We have to talk more about that. Please don't just buy it, okay?

Please don't just buy it. When I'm ready, I'll say go, and then you'll go, okay? So, let's learn how karmic seeds work, and then you can use them.

If you don't know how... Thanks. If you don't know how they work, you can't use them very well.

I say, if you learn how they work, you can make a 250 million dollar company, you can have a perfect relationship for 46 years, stuff like that, okay? It's possible, okay? But here's a step on the way there.

It's called the Mind Only School, okay? They say, when I yelled at my kid three days ago, I planted a karmic seed. How it's planted we'll talk about tomorrow, okay?

Because if you understand it, you can use it better. But it planted a karmic seed in my mind. Then, the next day, I saw my child...

I'm sorry, a week later, I came home and my husband yelled at me, okay? Mind Only School says, the seed was like the trunk of a tree, and I put a tree trunk in there for you somewhere. Okay, you got the branches?

Can you show the branches? That's okay. Okay, okay.

Mind Only School says, that karmic seed, when it opened, it split into two people. Who's one of them? Me.

Who's the other one? My partner, okay? One seed in my mind, which was planted when I yelled at my kids, okay?

One seed splits into two branches, okay? One creates me to stand in the kitchen. The other creates my husband to stand in the kitchen.

And then, one branch hits the other branch in the windstorm in the kitchen when he opens his mouth. Okay? Then the two branches go like, they hit each other.

There's an interaction between these two people, right? Are they separate? They have to be separate to affect each other.

To have an argument, you have to be separate from the... the arguer and the arguer have to be separate, okay? Are you separate from your husband?

Of course you are. You're hurt, he's hurting, okay? You're separate, okay?

But did you come from a separate cause? No, you both... you are two branches of a single tree, okay?

You are... one karmic seed opened, and there's your husband, and there's you, and then criticism is possible. Who planted the seed?

I did. Who caused the argument? I did.

When? When I yelled at the kids, okay? Is that correct according to Buddhism, all schools of Buddhism?

I don't see anything wrong with it. I had a major problem when we hit this subject in the monastery in like year number 18 or something. I was sitting there listening to the teacher and I was like, I don't buy this.

He's like, this is wrong. I'm like, I don't buy it. It sounds perfect to me.

It sounds absolutely correct. If I can plant karma by yelling at my kids, and then that karma opens, that karma puts me in the kitchen, and puts my husband in the kitchen, and is responsible for the words that pass between us, okay? It's...

it's perfect. I don't see any problem with it. What did my teacher say?

He didn't say no problem. In India, when you say no problem, it means there's a problem. Huh?

What? Yeah, okay, good, good, yeah. In that scenario, okay, I'm still feeling that my husband is made of, okay?

I'm still feeling that there's... you know, when I slap his face or whatever it is, let's not do that. When I touch him on the chest and say, please don't criticize me, okay?

When I touch him, I'm touching little pieces of him, okay? My hand is resting on a couple zillion little atoms of my husband, okay? And I...

I can understand that he came from the same seed as me. I can understand that criticizing my children sent him into the kitchen to criticize me, and sent me into the kitchen to be criticized by him. I can understand that.

But even while I'm understanding that, when I touch him on the chest, I think he's made of stuff. He's made of atoms. If I push his chest, it's more firm than the air, you know?

There's something there. There's some physical thing there. And...

and the carbon, and the calcium, and the iron in his skin, makes it firm. I can hold my hand against his chest, and it's different than if I hold my hand against the air. And I feel in my guts, visceral presupposition, that he's made of something physical, matter, out there.

He's made of little bits of matter, okay? That's called... those are called in West, they're called...

Wait, set your alarm for one minute from now. When you wake up, what are those little pieces of matter called in the West? Atom, okay?

So, unfortunately you have to learn, you have to hear the etymology of atom. And then we'll take a break, I promise, okay? Atom is two words, a and tam.

Say a. Tam. A is the privative initial in Greek, it means not, okay?

What are... give me any English word. Atheist, apathetic, which means not passionate, agnostic, not religious, huh?

Yeah, arrhythmic, good. It all means not, like ahinsa, not violent, okay? So, the A means not.

Tam is an ancient root that means to be cut, okay? Then temples were called temples because they were cut off from the rest of the village by a wall. And anatomy is...

ana means up, so what's anatomy? Anatomy, tam, cutting somebody up, okay? Epitome, the epi comes from abhidharma, okay?

Abhi, highest cut, a cut above, okay? So, the word atom means literally that which can no longer be divided. What do you call it?

Irreducible, okay? The smallest part of my husband's chest, when I push against him with my hand, is called atoms. And we're gonna...tonight's talk is about atoms, okay? We're gonna explore the idea of atoms. Is stuff made of atoms, okay? Why are we talking about...what do you think I'm gonna say? I'm gonna say no way, completely wrong. Then why should we...why don't we just go to the correct thing? Why do we have to pause at atoms?

Because deep in your guts you believe in it, very, very, very strongly, okay? You believe deeply there's something in the chair that makes it hard. You believe it with every ounce of your heart, okay?

Your whole life, until you die, until the moment you die, you will believe that. Unless something very unusual happens in your life, or an unusual lecture, you will believe that for the rest of your life, and it will cause you suffering. It will cause you trouble, okay?

It will make your life unhappy, okay? But first I have to give you...I have to show you what you're doing, okay? You deeply, you deeply, emotionally believe that the chair is made of something hard, okay?

You believe that. And you believe your husband is made of the same things. And if you have that much of a wrong idea about your husband, you will never, ever be happy with him.

It's not possible. It's impossible for a person who believes in atoms to have a successful relationship. I'm not kidding, okay?

I'm not kidding. It's not possible, okay? You're just frustrating yourself.

Go get married. Report back to me in ten years, you know? It's not possible.

You cannot have a truly fulfilling, joyful, lifetime relationship with another human being as long as you believe they're made of stuff, atoms, okay? It's not possible. And science cannot resolve the wave-particle duality and other problems of science so long as they believe in atoms.

So the next step after the break is we have to talk about atoms, okay? What's wrong with atoms, okay? Because otherwise I assert you can never have a perfect relationship, okay?

And it would be nice to have a perfect relationship. Okay, last thing. I have a short...two videos. Okay, this is how Mexican people react when you explain these things to them. This is last month in Mexico City. They are struggling with the very serious violence there.

You know, like 43 people were just found dead by the police. The police killed them. And they're struggling with how to solve the violence without being violent.

And we talked about it. What's the cause? You know, how do you get around the atoms to the real cause of violence?

And they got it. And it was so beautiful. It was really, really beautiful.

They understood it. A lady was shot outside the hall a few nights later in her car. She was executed outside the hall.

The same night, okay? And our people were the first people to try to treat her, but I think she died. But she was executed outside.

Not one of the people in the hall, but they understood. Something happened in their mind, and they heard about these ideas, and they understood it. And they understood how they could use it in Mexico.

It was really awesome. Something special happened in that moment, okay? Anyway, okay, last thing before the break.

Hey, he keeps saying that. I want to show you a video that Hector made. This is about something in New York City.

And this is what he did. Okay. So the Three Jewels has been going now for about 20 years, just short of 20 years.

We started in a burned out clothing store on, what's the fifth street, right? Fifth Street. And we redid the floor.

Andy redid the floor. Yeah. Anyway, and we started Freedom.

We decided at the beginning that it would always be free. And so we've been going for almost 20 years now. A couple, maybe, how many years ago we moved into a new space?

13 years ago, 10 years ago, we moved into a larger space. And that building is being sold, due to the zoning changes by Bloomberg, I think, the building is being sold. It'll probably be torn down for a big ugly skyscraper.

Now it's just a big ugly brick building. And so they gave us notice. We're on a month-to-month.

So we need to do a couple of things. We need help finding a new place to move into. I would like to see a place with more light.

I would like to see a place with windows on two sides, like maybe a corner somewhere, you know, with just all windows on two sides. I would like to see enough space to have a small place to sit down and have coffee, because that's how people really learn stuff, is by talking. And then I'd like to see enough space to have two classes going on at the same time.

And I'd like to see a configuration where you could move a curtain, move a thing, and open up the room and have a hundred people in a classroom. And I would like it to be on the ground level. You know, those of you who've ever tried to find the current Three Jewels, I can't, okay?

I've been coming here for a while, and I still need someone to take me there, because, you know, it's impossible to find it. It's like two flights up in a very dark building. And I would really like to see us find a space that has all glass on two sides, a corner space.

I'd like it to be ground-level. I'd like it to have enough room to have a little cafe, which is where real Dharma takes place, okay? So, first thing we need is people to help us find the place, okay?

So, you're gonna talk to Hector. He's gonna stand up. Raise your hand.

He's leading the search. He's the total energy behind the whole new project, and I'd like to thank him for that. So, the first thing we need is to find the space.

And he's been trying really hard. I think he's visited about 50 locations already, but he's only one person. He's only got two legs.

He needs help, okay? So, if you'd like to help him research places, we'd like a place in Manhattan. It's hard to find.

Secondly, we'll need moving costs. We think we will need at least two months rent. We think the rent will go up to maybe ten or fifteen thousand a month, okay?

And the DCI team has committed to raising half, okay? So, for moving costs, I figure we have to—you have to raise fifteen thousand, we'll raise fifteen thousand, okay? Right?

Something like that. Scott will give fourteen. Just kidding.

We'll raise half, okay? But you have to raise half, okay? Because I—you don't know, but the Three Jewels is very influential in world Dharma community.

Like, many people in many countries count on the Three Jewels, more than you imagine. You are known around the world, and people love the Three Jewels, because it's been around so long. People really care about the Three Jewels.

It's not hard for us to raise half. We can raise fifteen thousand of the moving cost. I don't think it's unreasonable, if it's for you guys, that you raise the other half, okay?

So, that's my first challenge to you. Raise the other half, okay? If I said we're all going to see the Hawking movie tomorrow night, and have some snack afterwards, and it'll cost $30, everybody says, we'll be there, Desi Michael.

If I say I need $30 donation for the $15,000—they say, I don't know. Just pretend it's a movie and a snack, okay? And not that you're saving the Dharma in America, okay?

So, that's my first request. Secondly, I believe the thing will cost $15,000 a month, and again, we're willing to raise half of it, okay? We challenge you to match us, okay?

We'll raise—DCI and the global community that counts on the teachers who come out of New York—we'll raise half of your rent every month, but you have to raise half, okay? Is that fair? So, there's a table in the back, put your money where your mouth is, okay?

And make the teachings free. These teachings—Rinpoche, my teacher, I asked him, how come you never charge for your teachings? He got angry, which happened only every few hours or so, for 25 years, and he said, he said, what are you going to charge for something which is beyond price?

What are you going to charge to save somebody's life? What's the—what is half of priceless, you know? How much money is priceless?

He got really upset, and he said, I don't charge because there isn't that much money in the world to charge for it. I don't charge because it would be ridiculous to put a price on it. If one person's life is changed in a major way, or even saved, literally, then what's the value of that?

What kind of price will you put on that, okay? So, this is a different organization than, you know, other stuff you can pay for in New York City. This is a very special thing.

It changes people's lives forever, right? And you should keep it open, okay? Not only open, you should make it better.

You should make it even more beautiful. It's kind of—it's kind of a sacred obligation to keep it open and keep it more and more—make it more and more beautiful. The Dharma shouldn't be kept in a dark second-story brick building, you know?

It should be in a beautiful place of light, and it should be where people can find it. So, I challenge you, we'll take care of half, if you take care of half, okay? And go sign up, there's a dollar a day thing, it doesn't hurt you, it just hurts you when they take your credit card, and then they charge you for the rest of your life a dollar a day, okay?

It's nothing. It's less than a movie and a dinner once a month, okay? Go sign up for a dollar a day.

Don't be—don't be crazy, okay? This stuff is valuable. It's precious.

It's the only place you can get it in New York City, okay? And you have to make it available. So, just—just bite the bullet tonight, just do it, okay?

Go there, they'll do all the computer thing, you just surrender your credit card for like one minute, and then silently it comes out forever, and you don't miss it. It doesn't hurt you, okay? But this is a very important thing.

I don't know, you let them know. Three Jewels—is it THR? Three Jewels spelled out dot org.

You can do PayPal online, but do it, okay? Just don't be crazy. Don't go and pay—who wants to go see a hockey movie tomorrow?

Really, I'm serious, I'm taking you. I am. Okay, forget it, if nobody wants to go, I'll just go by myself.

I'll go by myself, it's okay. So, it's like going to one movie. Really, just do it, okay?

Don't be crazy. Don't be like weird, okay? Keep it open, keep it beautiful, okay?

So, that's your job. Lastly, as last—as we did last night, the ACI teachers, the DCI teachers are coming up to the front. They'll be standing here.

Can you come up now, so they don't confuse me with you? Quick, quick, quick. Three-year retreat, etc.

Come, quick, quick. They can't move quickly, but that's not what they have to do. Come on, come on.

Okay, each of these people has been trained for many years—I think 20 years, right Vimala? 20 years—in how to solve problems using karmic methods and how to make amazing goals happen in your life using karmic methods. They're going to stand up here and give free karmic seed advice to anyone who wants it.

If you don't come up and ask them a question, it's like the Wizard of Oz coming to your house and you don't ask for something, okay? It's not, it's just crazy. So, they're here, look them over, see which one looks most reasonable to you, and then come up and ask them a question, okay?

Please use this resource. It took many years to create this resource. It's very valuable.

You are very lucky in New York. You have more teachers than anywhere else in the world, okay? Yeah.

Oh, Hector and John, can you also come? Do you mind? Can I borrow him, Joanne?

Okay, just for 20 years or so. Okay, then they can also help, okay? All right?

Okay, we'll take a 15-minute break, and we'll finish by 9. Okay, come back in 15. Okay, we'll start.

Hector, it's okay, 9.30? Okay. We're supposed to stop at 9.

The school's probably going to turn the lights off, and then I'll just keep talking. But we have about 15 more minutes, okay? So, I'm going to stall the questions until tomorrow, okay?

I said we'd have questions tonight, but we don't have time, so let's do it tomorrow. And then tomorrow I'll give you a text, a text telephone number, and you can text them, okay? You want to put it up now?

Is that okay? Okay, so either if you want to date with Hector, or you want to ask a question, here's a phone number for you. Can you put it up on there?

Okay, it's coming. Okay, we're going to start through the second reading, and I'm sorry we're so late getting there. So, we're starting on tonight's reading, so you should bring that reading tomorrow, and there'll also be another reading, God willing, Inshallah, for tomorrow.

We're going to start talking about atoms. The section is called The Problem with Atoms. But before we can talk about the problem with atoms, whose atoms do we have a problem with?

Yeah, your partner's chest, okay? So, if we can resolve the problems about your partner's chest atoms, I promised you what? A perfect relationship forever, okay?

That's pretty major claim, but it's true, okay? So, let's start with your partner's atoms, okay? There's a very fun presentation of atoms in the Abhidharmakosha written 17 centuries ago, and I'm going to take you through it, okay?

Let's go to the first page here, of tonight. Everybody have a reading for tonight? It's called The Problem with Atoms.

Does anybody have a reading for tonight? Okay, if you don't have one, can I say that? Oh, they've run out.

We'll bring more tomorrow, okay? So, just try to look on with your neighbor, okay? Put your atoms up next to their atoms.

And, okay. So, I took a piece out of the Abhidharmakosha. I like it.

It says the smallest thing in the universe is an atom. If you stretch seven atoms together in a line, you get the width of a molecule. Stretch seven of those in a line, you get an ironical, okay?

Meaning iron particle. Stretch seven of those in a line, you get a water particle, rabbit particle, sheep particle, bull particle. Seven bull particles long is the width of a dust mote in a ray of sunlight coming through the window.

And that's the photo I put there of some lady with her hand up, okay? That's the smallest thing that a human eye could detect in the ancient times, was a dust mote moving through the sunlight as it comes into a room, okay? Put seven of those together, and it's big enough for a flea egg.

Put seven of those together, it's big enough to be a flea. Put seven of those together, it's long enough to be, wide enough to be a barley grain. Put seven of those together, and you get a finger width.

Finger width is this, okay? This, this measurement here, okay? In Chinese, it's called, Chinese medicine?

Cun. This, this length here. It's very useful in medicine to take the measurements from the human body.

Why? Because they're different for each person, okay? If you're a small person, your cuns are less than a fat person.

So, if you want to find their appendix, your cun is better than using some big guy's cun, okay? So, 24 of those equals a, we call it a cubit, meaning the length from the middle finger to your elbow. You can check it out, okay?

Should be six of these. One, two, oops, four, five, six, okay? In a well-proportioned person.

And then, this is called a tomen, I think. What do you call that? A fathom in the West.

It's an arm span, and in a well-proportioned person, their arm span is equal to their height, okay? So, from this finger to here is six feet for me, and my height is the same. And that's four true, there's four cubits.

There's two, and there's two. So, that's a fathom. 500 fathoms are a yojana, okay?

Yojana is about half a mile, okay? And that's how they measured things in ancient times in India, okay? They started with subatomic particles, and they went up to half miles, called yojana, okay?

Why are we talking about that? Just for fun, I calculated it back, and somebody more qualified like Mahesh could do it. Maybe, that's your homework, where are you?

Yeah, maybe at home you can work on that, okay? Go backwards according to this chart, from your body arm span, from your height. Go backwards along those calculations, and according to me, I did it quickly, you get, you get nine picometers, which is a trillionth of a meter at the end, as the size of an atom.

And that's within range of what Western scientists say for the width of a helium atom, okay? So, it's very cool. The Buddhists, 17 centuries ago, stated the width of an atom.

It's within about an order of eight from a Western presentation, which is extremely close, okay? How did they do that? Do you know?

In meditation, okay? They went down into the components of the body and measured it, okay? It's very cool.

Okay, the shape of an atom, I put a photo of one, or a diagram of one here from Wikipedia, and the general shape is a sphere, considering the whole electron field which circles the nucleus, okay, of the atom. Why are we talking about atoms? And that's at the bottom of, I forget what page, two or three?

After the bollicles and stuff. It talks about your husband, okay? When you have an interchange with your husband, when you look at your husband, or you think about your husband, you have this deep-seated belief that what you're seeing is a skin coating a skeleton, and inside of the bones are cavities, and filling up the cavities are organs, and then the organs are made of skin themselves, and that skin is thousands of patches of, little patches of skin touching each other, and each particle of the skin is composed of smaller parts of skin, until you get down to an atom, okay? Whether you call it nine picometers, picometers? Picometers.

Or you call it 90. Deep down inside of you, for your whole life, and still, no matter how much you've been trained in ACI at three jewels, you believe that stuff is made of little bits of stuff, okay? You believe that, especially because it's so solid, okay?

You believe that your body and the body of your partner is made of little pieces of stuff. You believe that. You really do believe that.

We all believe that. And who else believes that? Science, okay?

Science is based on that. The physical sciences are based on that belief, okay? Let's explore that belief.

We'll start tonight, we'll continue tomorrow, okay? Let's go to the next section. I already went over with you the meaning of the word, the literal, how do you say, etymology of atom, meaning irreducible or indivisible, okay?

And it's an old idea. If, at the bottom of there, I put in the definition of an atom from Wikipedia, okay? The smallest recognized division of a chemical element.

What's that mean? If you split it, what happens? You lose the qualities of the chemical element, okay?

So, if you take an iron atom, Fe, right? Ferrous metal, and it has a certain number of protons, electrons, and neutrons. If you—and they're in a certain configuration, okay?

I think it's 26. I forget the atomic number, but I think it's 26 protons. If you take out one, if you bust off an electron from the outer shell, the valence electron, what happens to the iron atom?

It becomes manganese. It changes. The stuff changes to manganese, I think.

You can check the chart, okay? 25, I think, I'm not sure. If you strip a electron off of a iron atom, it changes to a different thing, okay?

What that means is that, according to science, the atom is the smallest piece of stuff of a chemical, okay? Meaning of a thing that acts in a certain way. If you bust off enough electrons off of an iron atom, it will go down to helium, okay?

Hydrogen then helium, okay? It will become a totally different thing. It will act differently.

If your husband's atom's in his chest, when you're pushing against him, when he's refusing to take out the garbage, lost one electron, you know? You might be going through him. What does that mean?

Try to understand, okay? According to science, if you change a single subatomic particle in the atoms of your husband's chest, it would become something else, right? And it would act differently, okay?

So, an atom in science is the smallest thing that still acts like iron, okay? An atom iron is the smallest thing that still acts like iron. And if you go to its parts, it loses its ironness, okay?

Got it? Only that configuration of subatomic particles— protons, neutrons, and electrons—only that particular arrangement of those things is iron. And if you change it in any way at an atomic level, it becomes something else, okay?

That means that there's something about, according to science, there's something about a thing which has, I don't know, is it 36 protons in the nucleus? What do you call it? Atomic number 30, was it 25?

Sorry, iron? It's down there somewhere. If you take off one subatomic particle, sorry it's not electron, it's a neutron, it will change, it will become something else, okay?

Proton, sorry. Anyway, it will become something else. Got it?

Agree? That's what science says. Got it?

We okay with that? Okay, let's keep going. What happens when you divide it, okay?

And scientists used to think that atoms were atom, indivisible, okay? That's why they call them atoms, okay? Not a-tums, okay?

And then, and here's the definition of a, truly elementary particles, this is from some science website, an elementary particle is considered a subatomic particle which cannot be broken down into any simpler particle, have been given the names quarks and leptons. Each particle has six quarks, for example. The six quarks are named silly names, they made up silly names for the quarks, okay?

They are up, down, charm. You got to show the next photo, what are you guys doing down there? Okay, why is she in the discussion on quarks?

She has charm, okay? Then there's strange, top, and beauty. These are the names of the six quarks, okay?

Are they silly names? Yes, they were meant to be silly, okay? They didn't know, what do you call a thing when there's nothing to compare it to?

So, call it charm, what the heck. Call it beauty, all right? Or bollicle, or ironicle, got it?

They did the same thing as Vasubandhu, they just made up some funny name and said, let's call it a charm, and let's call it beauty, okay? Really, and those are the smallest pieces of matter, okay? When you combine those six, you get protons and neutrons, okay?

And you get three other common subatomic particles called electrons, neutrinos, and positrons. Don't ask me the difference, I have no idea. Let's go down to the atomic periodic table.

I have zero minutes. It's the rectangle with all the colors in it. You had to study it in seventh grade and you haven't seen it since, okay?

Me neither, okay? Yeah, there's iron at 26, okay? And then manganese at 25, okay?

So, these are 118 chemical elements. Why are they elements? They are atoms.

Why are they atoms? What's the 26 mean? It comes from the total number of, huh?

Protons in the atom, okay? And then they have an arrangement. The atoms that have the same number of electrons in the outer shell, they have multiple shells, okay?

And the shells fill up and then you start another shell. If the number of electrons in a shell, in the outermost shell, is the same, then those things are in the same column in the periodic table. So, periodic means they exhibit common attributes.

If you're in the same column, you're always, for example, a noble gas or something like that, okay? Inert gas, okay? So, that determines the—if you mess with the subatomic particles in an atom, the thing changes to something else.

That's the bottom line, okay? It would change number on the atomic number and it would change places in the chart. If it went to a different row in a different column, its characteristics would change.

It would change from something hard to something soft, for example. It might even become a gas rather than a metal, okay? Got it?

So, you can't treat atoms in less than atoms and expect them to act the same, okay? If you are dealing with only a part of an atom, don't expect it to be hard, even if it's iron, okay? Even if an atom is iron, if you bump into a piece of that atom and you don't interact with all the electrons and protons and neutrons, don't expect it to be like iron, okay?

Now, I'll leave you with something, okay? I'll leave you with something. The first night's talk was about, I think, 15 kinds of causes, okay?

The most elementary one is Aristotle's efficient cause. Something bumps into something else and changes it, okay? Now, try to imagine your finger, okay?

I'll demonstrate. This is made of some kind of metal, I don't know exactly, okay? Then my finger, I touch the metal of the Mac or Big Mac or whatever it is, and then my finger bends and the computer doesn't get a hole in it, okay?

Got it? Is my finger touching metal? Is my finger touching metal?

Does my finger yield to the harder metal? I'm trying as hard as I can, it does yield to the harder metal, okay? For my finger to yield to metal, try to grasp this and then go home and sleep on it, okay?

I give you permission to go home after that. One more minute, okay? If the side of the laptop acts like metal to my finger when they interact, it means my finger must be interacting with all of the electrons, protons and neutrons in each atom of the surface of the computer.

Yes or no? If it's interacting with only some of them, it might act like water or helium, okay? All of them have to be there for there to be hardness in this metal, okay?

All of the atoms of the surface that my finger yields to must have all their protons, electrons and neutrons. Can we say yes or no? Is it possible for the atoms of my finger to touch at the same time all of the particles of each atom on the surface?

It's not possible, okay? Why? Each of those particles has a width, okay?

That's why I put the next picture. It's like the back of a car. I'm going to get sued by the lady if she ever finds out.

Come on. There you go. Oh, you skipped her.

Yeah. Okay? Why did I put this picture here?

What happens if the right shoulder of the guy on the right meets the left shoulder of the guy on the left? There's no space for the girl in the middle to be, okay? What would happen if the left side of the iron atom met the right side?

It wouldn't exist because there'd be no place, okay? If the left side of the atom bumped into the right side as if his shoulder met his shoulder, could the girl be in the car, in that position? No, not possible.

If I don't touch both shoulders, it's not hard anymore. Just go home with that, okay? Why am I talking about this?

Is it possible that the people who have invented science over the last 1600 years had preconceived notions that have, how do you say it, biased everything they ever thought about this metal, okay? Is it possible that they are all completely, totally wrong about how this thing works? Is it possible?

Is it possible they have a very deep-seated, wrong idea, bias, preconception about this thing? Would you then—okay, last thing I promise—would you then expect small indications, even in their own theories, that seem a little like a dead fish? No, there should be cracks.

If what they think is not a little wrong, but utterly wrong, okay? If the atomic theory itself is utterly wrong, there should be some major discrepancy showing up in science. Like, there's no unified theory of science.

Nobody can explain the interaction of the way small particles behave and the way universes behave. They cannot. There's also a thing called wave-particle duality.

We're going to talk about it tomorrow, okay? The way you measure light in some situations indicate that it's made of balls moving in a straight line. And then, at other times, it has to be a wave, okay?

So, the same scientist—Einstein, and you can look it up, I have the quotation in the reading—admitted that there's a fundamental misunderstanding in science about the most important things. What makes up matter? Is it acting as a wave or a particle?

And he said, we don't know. Because sometimes it acts one way, sometimes it acts the other way, and sometimes it acts both ways, okay? Got it?

You can't touch the computer, and Einstein can't explain the way things—the stuff that makes up things, okay? Got it? Yes, but Geshe Michael—Einstein blew up—what's it called?—Hiroshima.

Einstein blew up Hiroshima. He must know something. Something he thinks must be correct.

What's the answer I have for that? What do you guess from yesterday? Come on.

The fact that he blew up a city means he's not a scientist. The fact that they could blow up a city means they didn't understand how atoms work. Try to grasp that, okay?

Try, try, okay? What I'm saying is, if Einstein had understood the way atoms work, they never would have blown up a city. They could not have.

They could not have, okay? And I'm not saying moral—what do you call it?—inhibition. I'm not talking about that.

It would have been physically impossible for Einstein to be involved with the destruction of a city and all its people if he had understood an atom, okay? It would not be possible to create a thing that would blow up a city if he understood how an atom works, okay? Chew on that, okay?

What's that imply about tomorrow? We're going to talk about how an atom really works, okay? Then, in theory, it would be possible to make an automobile that never crashed, never killed a person.

In theory, if you understood what makes an airplane fly, okay, it would be an airplane that could never fall down, okay? Think about it. 275,000 people died last year in China, for example, from automobile accidents.

If we can find the correct explanation of the atom, it could have been avoided. 300,000 people would be alive today who are not, okay? It's a very serious question.

I'm not playing with you. Sometimes I do play with you, but I'm not playing with you now, okay? If we understood correctly what makes an atom work, the things we make with those atoms could never kill a human being.

Neither guns, okay? Got it? I mean, you understand the claim.

You don't understand what I'm going to say because I didn't say it yet, okay? Got it? Unless we were in a black hole and there's a singularity and time was moving backwards.

Just kidding. Okay, so tomorrow our goal is to explain atoms and matter in such a way to complete the ideas of science, which have come a long way. We will be using scientific method, okay?

We'll go back to scientific method, we'll dissect scientific method, and we'll try to apply it, we'll try to perfect it in order to complete science. We will use their own rules, okay, to examine is there a better understanding of atoms. Are we somehow living in a civilization which is stunted and which hasn't evolved fully yet?

Is it possible there could be higher forms of civilization on this planet where people never got hurt, okay? Got it? Because that's what science should be doing, okay?

Alright, that's all. Good luck. See you tomorrow.

[Speaker 2]
Do you believe in magic in your dreams?